[tahoe-dev] integrate with an existing backup tool instead of writing our own?

[zooko]

On Sep 26, 2008, at 8:05 AM, zooko wrote:

 > Hm...  You know, we might be able to do a lot better than "15
 > hours of rehashing every file" if we track dev,inode pairs
 > along with size,mtime...  :-) We might be able to get it down
 > to "2.6 minutes of traversing the filesystem checking that the
 > shape of the tree and the dev,inode,size,mtime metadata still
 > fits".

And that makes me think that it would be even better if we would
spend a millisecond accepting a notification from inotify [1]
which says "Hello, this is the kernel speaking.  The directory
formerly linked from '/home' under the name 'warner' has just
been relinked into '/home' under the name 'brianwarner'.  Have a
nice day!".

And that makes me think that implementing a good, usable,
high-performance backup tool is a non-trivial job and that we've
been sitting around re-inventing the wheel, when really Tahoe
ought to be integrated with duplicity [2], bacula [3], boxbackup
[4], amanda [5], dirvish [6], um zu sync [7], backuppc [8], dar
[9], hdup [10], or some of the other three hundred and eighty
projects which are marked as "System :: Archiving :: Backup" on
freshmeat.net: [11].

Some of those tools already have inotify integration.  Many of
them already have something that Tahoe does not have: a team of
developers who like to do nothing more than sit around working on
backup tools all day.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
[2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
[3] http://www.bacula.org/en/
[4] http://www.boxbackup.org/
[5] http://www.amanda.org/
[6] http://www.dirvish.org/
[7] http://freshmeat.net/projects/umzusync/
[8] http://freshmeat.net/projects/backuppc/
[9] http://freshmeat.net/projects/dar/
[10] http://freshmeat.net/projects/hdup/
[11] http://freshmeat.net/browse/137/